[ryanobjc]

So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities"

This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".

Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?

One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.

[nradov]

Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish something like this, no talent required.

[harimau777]

I don't think it is necessarily that simple. A pickup truck, a few tools, and enough time or savings to spend starting a business is a lot more than many people have. Then there's survivor bias; while it may have worked out for them, how many people did it not work out for. Finally, there's the issue that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Someone has to actually work at the various businesses that exist and are being created.

[nradov]

Regardless of what you might "think", it really is necessarily that simple. If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.

[fc417fc802]

> If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.

That is true but it does not imply that success is possible for all people in all cases.

I can always blame some external factor for my loss in a competition but it is not necessarily within the realm of (realistic) possibility for me to win every possible matchup.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.

Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.

To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.

Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.

I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.

> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.

> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?

> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.

"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.

[dragonwriter]

> "My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.

No, if it were true, standing on its own, it would be an accurate statement of fact. It is only be the ad hominem fallacy if it forms part of an argument with this logical structure:

1. My opponents argue X, but

2. My opponents are lying racists, therefore

3. X is false.

[AnthonyMouse]

That is the structure of the argument. X is that DEI is a bad policy.

[harimau777]

While many regulations exist due to regulatory capture, many also exist for good reasons. Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.

I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.

What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?

The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.

> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.

In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.

[ryanobjc]

A restaurant out of your home presents a public health risk sadly. Foodborne illnesses are rare, because of the regulations placed on commercial food sellers.

There are likely ways we can give more latitude, but home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.

Unfortunately in terms of "overreaching" regulations, this is the worst example: food borne illneses are very real killers, and a major risk.

Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.

Really in terms of overbearing regulations, these two actually protect lives every single day. Remember the "Ghost Ship" fire? Caused by electrical fire. Norovirus on cruise ships? Cause hospitalization and evacuation.

I'm all for minimizing regulations, but many many of them are literally written in blood, and the notion that we can wholesale relax them with no ill consequence is just not true.

[AnthonyMouse]

> A restaurant out of your home presents a public health risk sadly. Foodborne illnesses are rare, because of the regulations placed on commercial food sellers.

> home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.

This has nothing to do with zoning rules. You're not allowed to operate a restaurant on that piece of land regardless of what kind of kitchen you have. Requiring specific materials or equipment is not the same thing as "doing this is banned here but allowed somewhere you can't afford".

> Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.

Your assumption is that the rules improve safety when it's quite the opposite. A license should be something you get by passing a licensing exam, and taking the licensing exam should be free. Anyone who knows the material gets the license, immediately, at no cost.

Instead we have apprenticeship requirements whose purpose is to constrain the supply of people who hold the license. That increases the cost of hiring a professional, which causes more work to be done by amateurs even if it's illegal, or to ignore problems because they can't afford to pay someone to fix them. Which is how you get electrical fires.

Don't confuse actual safety rules with regulatory capture protectionism that compromises safety to pad the coffers of the incumbents.

[fc417fc802]

The electrical example is particularly interesting because it's generally legal to DIY things on a house that you simultaneously own and live in. Many (not sure if all) US states even have laws preventing insurance from forbidding such (although they can generally deny coverage after the fact if the incident can be shown to stem from your DIY work).

There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.

Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.

I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation.

This is the ex post facto rationalization of the rules, not the actual reason. The actual reason is that businesses are more likely to have contracted it out regardless so are less likely to oppose, and are the more lucrative customers for the license holders lobbying for the rules, whereas homeowners object more and have a larger voting block.

Notice that the rules are based on use and not occupancy. A residential multi-unit condo will have more occupants than a small business that only serves five customers at once.

Meanwhile nobody actually wants an electrical fire. The primary thing leading to shoddy workmanship is artificial supply constraints on professional work, which creates financial pressure for amateurs to covertly perform work they're not qualified to do because there aren't enough professionals and puts the professionals under time pressure because there is too much work for them to complete with that number of workers.

[fc417fc802]

> When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases.

To be fair oftentimes that documentation is due to the regulations you're speaking against here. I'm not necessarily taking a side. It just seemed relevant to point out.

[harimau777]

> Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?

Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.

[AnthonyMouse]

The single largest capital requirement for most new small businesses is real estate, and is real estate because mixed use zoning is prohibited in the vast majority of areas in the US, requiring the proprietor to separately pay for somewhere to put the business and somewhere to live. Zoning is a local regulation and there are very many localities completely controlled by Democrats, so why does this continue to be the case?

[ryanobjc]

The notion that "many localities completely controlled by Democrats" is just not really true. The idea that zoning reform is a no-brainer and easy is also clearly not true: it's been a major teeth pull in SF and California, and many different people are pushing back.

Additionally somewhere like SF isn't a monolith, and despite voting heavily for federal democrats, the local elections aren't so clear cut.

Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?

I would say this: modern development doesn't always make the kinds of mixed used neighborhoods that people truly want and love. The cost of development often results in street level vacant commercial space, and that is not good for neighborhoods. Yes a complete revamp of zoning could change this - but would it? How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?

It just isn't trivial sadly.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The notion that "many localities completely controlled by Democrats" is just not really true.

There are in actual fact many cities where Democrats control every branch of local government.

> The idea that zoning reform is a no-brainer and easy is also clearly not true: it's been a major teeth pull in SF and California, and many different people are pushing back.

That's the point. Democrats, despite having majority control in such areas, don't actually do it.

> Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?

If you're an incumbent property owner then you want the value of your existing property to go up. If you want to move into an area you don't already live or build something there, you want property to be affordable. Since only the first group gets a vote in local elections, there is a perverse incentive to maintain artificial scarcity.

> How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?

It's a structural failure that comes from doing zoning at the local level. Alice owns a house in San Francisco and intends sell it and buy one in LA. Bob owns a house in LA and intends to sell it and buy one in San Francisco. Therefore Alice currently wants housing to be expensive in San Francisco and cheap in LA and Bob wants the opposite. But Alice only gets a vote in San Francisco and Bob only gets a vote in LA, so they each vote for housing to be expensive there and then it ends up expensive everywhere. As soon as Bob buys the house in San Francisco and consequently a vote there, he wants that house to cost more rather than less.

If you prohibit scarcity-inducing zoning practices at the state or federal level then Alice and Bob no longer have a strong preference since the rule now affects them both when they sell and when they buy instead of only one of those, but all of the people who don't already own property can now vote in an election for someone that has jurisdiction.